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Dennis Price

1 bookEducational & AcademicReligion & SpiritualityHistorical Non-Fiction

Dennis Price writes about the moral and institutional fences that once made high-trust societies possible, and what happens when they are pulled down in the name of autonomy. Trained in the history of ideas and public ethics, he has spent years arguing that flourishing requires unchosen limits, skin in the game, and subsidiarity rather than central blueprints. The Refusal of Limits is his attempt to diagnose Western decay without offering another political masterplan. He lives in Australia and writes for readers who still believe character, covenant and local duty matter more than compliance theatre.

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The Refusal of Limits

The Refusal of Limits

Why tearing down inherited fences invites decay, compliance and reset

  • Educational & Academic
  • Religion & Spirituality
  • Historical Non-Fiction

Western prosperity did not grow from unconstrained choice. It grew behind fences most people never voted on: moral limits, high-trust covenants, local duty, and the quiet habit of submitting to unchosen constraints. Dennis Price starts with Chesterton's fence and treats biblical texts as behavioural evidence, not sermon. He shows how self-deification, Enlightenment unmooring, French-style state secularism and postmodern doubt tore those fences down. What replaced them was not freedom but risk-averse bureaucracy, demographic collapse, welfare fiscal traps, and the invitation of strongmen, technocrats or algorithms to restore order from above. Unlike cultures that fail through kin capture, the modern West fails through boundary loss and procedural legalism. Price stress-tests the thesis against eight serious objections, concedes what remains open, and refuses central masterplans. The alternative is not nostalgia. It is subsidiarity, skin in the game, and strong local communities that can still say no.

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